Kevin Killeen’s Thomas Browne is a volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series, which purports to “make available for a new generation of readers the key works of the major British authors in freshly conceived, authoritative, and readable editions,” and, for the most part, this edition does so admirably. Kevin Killeen is well chosen for the task. He is editing Pseudodoxia Epidemica for the forthcoming complete works of Browne, which, one expects, will become the standard scholarly edition for professional use. Presumably the present edition, then, is intended to fill the gap left by the one-volume editions by Patrides (Penguin) and Keynes (OUP). The present edition exceeds these in many respects and is a welcome addition to the shrinking list of titles of seventeenth-century literature in print, a lack acutely felt by those teaching senior undergraduate or graduate seminars.

This edition offers a fuller body of the major works than its predecessors, including complete texts of Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, Certain Miscellany Tracts, A Letter to a Friend, Christian Morals, and almost the entire Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which is why it is such a hefty tome at 1,000 pages. The edition focuses on the printed works, omitting works that appeared only in manuscript, such as “On Dreams” and “Repertorium”; and contrary to the OUP website, it does not in fact include “generous selections from Browne’s notebooks and correspondence, as well as his often over-looked scientific writings” (depending on what is meant by “scientific writings”). Nonetheless, there is plenty here for a one-volume edition. The works are arranged chronologically, and the freshly edited texts are based on the first authorized print editions (with some content added from later editions of Psuedodoxia Epidemica); significant manuscript variants and additions are provided in the notes. The text is lightly modernized and regularized, and printers’ errors are silently corrected. The glosses and annotations (supplied as endnotes) are informative and generous.

This is a bibliographically sensitive edition, preserving aspects of the original printings that less enlightened editors sometimes omit, including preliminaries and even a full table of contents in cases where one was provided in the original printing, which is most welcome in the case of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, providing an overview of this complex work. And, gratefully, it reproduces marginalia in situ on the page, even though they tax the book’s designer in a few cases where the margins can barely contain Browne’s annotations. Attentive to this bibliographic challenge, Killeen includes an instructive facsimile of a full opening of Hydriotaphia (pages 2–3 in the original) where Browne’s original printer was forced to innovate with his layout to keep the profuse marginalia in line with the text.

The edition, however, is not flawless. One wishes the editor might have had more help in copyediting. Faults will escape any editor, but the reading of “Psa. 633” in the margin of page 526 should have caught someone’s eye. To complicate matters, the note provides the full reference correctly (Psalm 63:9), but then supplies a second, complementary reference incorrectly, indicating Psalm 89:15, when it should be (as in the 1669 edition) Psalm 139:15. Another concerning irregularity is the way in which Greek is handled in the marginalia. In some cases, it is omitted (as on 529 and 557), while in other cases it is included (535). There is a similar case involving a quotation and citation of Pliny in the margins of the original, where in the edition the quotation is retained but the citation has been removed to a note (535). The evident lack of support for proofreading is troubling, especially given the exorbitant list price of £95 / $160 for the hardcover. Moreover, at this price one would expect a more robust binding (sewn, rather than glued). With a newly edited complete works of Browne forthcoming, one imagines that OUP intends the present edition for classroom use, but at this price it is doubtful anyone could assign it as required reading. I want to think that with use this edition will prove itself an authoritative and convenient option for scholars, but if I hadn’t been supplied one for review, given the price, I would probably continue to content myself with my ratty old Penguin.